We have heard over and over again about the need to remediate mission critical computers in a triage fashion. The Federal Government is reputed to have 77,000 systems (GAO), of which less than 7000 were thought to be mission critical. The Federal Government has spent approximately 10 billion dollars in remediation costs to date for these systems. We have been bombarded with Monday morning quarterbacks who now state that remediation was both a farce and a hoax. My question then that everyone should be able to agree to is: If 70000 systems are neither mission critical or as the optimist "feel" not in need of remediation, then why not abandon these systems and save the US Taxpayers approximately 70 Billion dollars in costs? Opinions please.

-- PA Engineer (PA Engineer@longtimelurker.com), January 07, 2000

Answers

employment?

-- simple (simple@pure&simpleee.xcom), January 07, 2000.

PA Engineer,

Your question has been haunting me for some time now. If a system is indeed non-critical (basically non-essential to the job), why then was the money wasted on installing it and the support that must accompany it ? What ? Do they play Solitaire or just "surf the net" on these during coffee break ?

Hmm. Somebody isn't being honest, one way or another. I would say this could be cause for a Congressional Hearing into wasteful spending OR lying to John Q. Public. I guess this is about as close as Uncle Sam will ever come to repeatedly admitting guilt to "something". NON-MISSION CRITICAL SYSTEMS.

-- Rob (maxovrdrv51@hotmail.com), January 07, 2000.

PA Engineer, you have QUITE a point there. MAN, do you have a point there.

-- DB (tomG@h.com), January 07, 2000.

How much did that house in New York cost the Klintons again??????

-- Satanta (EventHoriz@n.com), January 07, 2000.

PA Engineer:

No doubt about it, there's a disconnect SOMEWHERE, but I-for-one can't find it! YET.

Here's what I think. Hack away one and all:

What gives? Money wasnt spent in a lot of nations, yet few reports of failures appear. Theres too many non-mainstream media reports getting out for anyone to seriously believe all is well. But then what IS going on?

- Y2K a hoax? No, as systems deliberately not repaired failed. - Y2K overhypeda non-event? Possible, but not probable, as governments, contract computer experts and scores of scientists, systems specialists and strategic thinkers believed the Y2K problem was realthough they disagreed about the impacts and effects. - Y2K impacts not complete? Probable, as reports continue to come in usually through unconventional (non-mainstream media) sources. - Y2K impact media coverup? Highly improbable, as western nations dont function in secrecy. Silence from communist statesthose who spent the least on y2k remediationcould mean a coverup. - Y2K impact govt/corporate coverup? Quite probable, given the propensity of corporations to decline giving the SEC informationeven when required by lawor the axiomatic philosophy of many governments to withold information from their citizens, for whatever reason seems applicable. - Y2K impact media minimizing/ignoring? Probable, as the mainstream media is well-known for its short memory and bias on subjects it does not supportlike the recent discovery that the mainstream media was deliberately biasing reports on gun control in favour of the anti-gun lobby.

There isn't enough information to come to any defensible conclusion so far... but I have no reason to believe that Y2K impacts and effects have come and gone for good...

-- (Kurt.Borzel@gems8.gov.bc.ca), January 07, 2000.

Can anyone say BEAN COUNTERS?

-- Aunt Bee (SheriffAndy@Mayberry.com), January 07, 2000.

folks:

just because a system is not *mission-critical* does not mean that it is useless and unncessary. *mission-critical* means that extremely bad things will happen if the system goes down for any length of time, ie. control system for a nuclear power plant.

non-mission-critical means that, although it will be a painful if the system goes down, it won't be a major disaster -- we can live with the system being down for a little while. that doesnt mean that these systems are not needed or a waste of money. In Y2K terms mission- critical was stuff like telecommunications, power supply, airplanes staying in the sky, and the banking system. non-mission-critical is everything else, we could live survive if the nations' subways went down, it would be a mjor inconvenience, but not a catastrophe.

i can't believe you folks are even debating this issue.

-- levi (levi@totalmail.net), January 07, 2000.

levi

Maybe you can add something of substance about some of the 70000 systems. If you know what the purpose is for them please share it with us rather than dismissing the thread with a handwave.

-- PA Engineer (PA Engineer@longtimelurker.com), January 08, 2000.

My vote goes to...

PA Engineer for President in 2000!!

-- Hawk (flyin@high.again), January 08, 2000.

You sould like one who thinks the governement is pulling one over on you and generally don't believe what the government tells you. If there is anything to wonder about it is why do you choose to believe part of what they tell you?

i.e.

1) How do you really know that the 7,000 figure is correct?

2) How do you really know that the 70,000 figure is correct?

3) How do you really know that the non-mission critical systems are non-mission critical and that is just the way to say they are compliant?

4) We are all going to learn a lot in the next 60 days when we find out if Germany, Japan and the rest of the world that did nothing still function or not after doing very little work. So how do you really know that most of those systems needed fixing?

-- Interested Spectator (is@the_ring.side), January 08, 2000.

Interested Spectator " You sould (sic) like one who thinks the governement (sic) is pulling one over on you and generally don't believe what the government tells you. If there is anything to wonder about it is why do you choose to believe part of what they tell you?"

Actually, I have been reading the GAO (educate yourself-http:// www.gao.gov) reports quite closely and taking at face value what the government has said. What I sound like may not be what you heard but what you want to hear.

" 1) How do you really know that the 7,000 figure is correct?"

We do not. If you do please enlighten us. Otherwise we have to go with the GAO and OMB numbers.

" 2) How do you really know that the 70,000 figure is correct?"

We do not. If you do please enlighten us. Otherwise we have to go with the GAO and OMB numbers.

" 3) How do you really know that the non-mission critical systems are non-mission critical and that is just the way to say they are compliant?"

I think we can agree that the compliant ones would have been added to the overall performance data. Again we do not know. If you do please enlighten us. Otherwise we have to go with the GAO and OMB numbers.

" 4) We are all going to learn a lot in the next 60 days when we find out if Germany, Japan and the rest of the world that did nothing still function or not after doing very little work. So how do you really know that most of those systems needed fixing?"

We shall see. I will go on record as stating that I respect the GAO and find them to be both a reliable source of information as well a credible one. If you have doubts about the GAO please take it up with them.

For the newbies here I will be reposting "The rules of disinformation" for your enjoyment under a new thread;)

-- PA Engineer (PA Engineer@longtimelurker.com), January 08, 2000.

Consider that 1)pork-barrelling is rampant in govt, and 2) bureaucrats are hardly ever fired.

Few govt agencies/programs are ever stopped. It's the nature of govt to grow as large as it can.

I expect that there are plenty of govt programs that are no longer needed, but continue on anyways.

Sure does make one wonder though, if it's not critical to their "mission", why not get rid of it.

I know for sure that my local govt does damn little for me -doesn't provide fire protection - volunteer fire dept, doesn't provide water/sewer - out in the country a few miles, doesn't provide power - coop does that, police protection is laughable - 10+ miles from police station and response time is a sad joke ( 2 cops in whole township). So, what the f**k do they do with the $700+ a year that I have to give to them?!

The FEDS are worse, only we paid them $10000+ last year, and for damn little.

-- Bill (billclo@msgbox.com), January 08, 2000.

My point is that you have this burning paradox that you can't explain. All paradoxes (paradoxi?) are based on assumptions, change the assumptions and the paradox resolves itself. You are assuming that your facts from the GAO are correct. So either you live with your paradox or change the assumptions.

The choice is yours.

-- Interested Spectator (is@the_ring.side), January 08, 2000.

No, IS, he has another choice: raise the question for debate. Your "accept it and shut up," approach is an attempt to avoid even looking at what is a very legitimate question, an attempt to silence questions.

Discussing these things is the very purpose of this forum.

Deal with it.

-- rocky (rknolls@no.spam), January 08, 2000.

Mission critical and Non-Mission Critical are not very definitive terms. In our shop, and most others I know of, Mission Critical systems are those that are vital to the organization and must be available at all times. Non-Mission Critical systems are important to the company, but if they are down for a time it doesn't hurt the company.

An example of mission-critical at my company would be the payroll system. My company has all aspects of its Payroll done electronically such as daily punch-ins for the hourly employees. This system is critical. It must always be up.

An example of a non-critical system at my company would be the database that stores property information. Who has what where. It's important, but the organization could function if it were down for a time.

We use these terms like triage. Many companies, my own included, have plans in place to set up systems at another site in the event of a disaster like an earthquake, for example. The systems deemed critical get priority and are set up first. The non-critical are set up after the critical are running. The mission critical systems were given priority for Y2K readiness.

We had the time to remediate the non-critical systems at my shop. We weren't sure we'd have the time but we did. Since we did not know when we first started testing how long it would take to get our systems Y2K ready, we had planned to fix the non-critical as they failed. We could not allow this to happen to the critical.

The critical systems at my site are to be available 24x7. The non- critical should be available by 8AM each working day.

-- Chris Josephson (chrisj62954@aol.com), January 08, 2000.

IS has a point. One assumption here is that because the government was only *tracking* mission critical systems, therefore they were only *addressing* mission critical systems. I recall 3 or 4 reports from agencies who reported remediating *all* their systems. I don't recall any reports of any agency not working on any non mission critical systems.

Another assumption is that all systems, critical or not, made roughly equal use of dates in the code. I certainly don't know if this is true of all the non mission critical systems. Some of them might have been pretty easy to fix.

Yet another assumption is that fix on failure is not feasible. For many systems, it's good enough. Most date bugs can be tracked down and repaired quickly (within 1-3 days), enough to make a system perfectly functional for practical purposes. And this is good enough for non mission critical systems.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), January 08, 2000.

Rocky:

Did I say put and shutup? No I said *choose* between put and shut up *and* change the assumptions. You can debate till the cows come up and still not resolve the paradox if you don't change the assumptions. So please explain me what the benift of that would be. However, if you'd like to do that, please be my guest. This should be entertaining and educational. I never seen a paradox debated and resolved without changing the assumptions.

I suggest however, if you'd like to debate the issue, may be you'd like to take an approach that allows progress to resolve the paradox, as Flint did (thank you Flint), and debate the assumptions to see where they are wrong so the paradox can be removed and reality uncovered.

-- Interested Spectator (is@the_ring.side), January 08, 2000.

The point is that probably at least half of our current governmental functions could be handled much more cost-efficiently by the private sector, saving us a lot of tax money in wasted bureaucratic processes.

If someone who thinks like "PA Engineer" were elected President, he could start bidding government functions out to private enterprises, eventually cutting the size of our government in half and getting much better results from the highly competitive environment in the business world. Someone like that could get elected if he had the balls to guarantee that he would actually do it. Not just "promises," but guarantees.

-- Hawk (flyin@high.again), January 08, 2000.

Here is another point to ponder.What is mission critical to the gov't,may not be mission critical to me.A good example would be a bank that fixes most of its systems but determines that its small business accounts should be fixed last because they represent the least profit to the bank.To the small business involved it is very mission critical to their staying in business.

-- paul mika (tigerpm@netscape.com), January 08, 2000.

I'm just glad that, to date at least, the non critical systems appear to be shaking hands with the critical systems without passing them the flu.

I could never really believe that everyone everywhere in every place got all of the systems sorted correctly as to critical/non critical. So far it hasn't seemed to matter much though.

A miracle or pure serendipity, either way I am happy with it so far. Just hope that it continues.

And, before you all start beating up on me about it, YES, I do realize that several hundred thousand geeks/geekettes around the world sweated blood for us, and fixed eleventy twelve gadzillion systems and kept it all running.

I just have a hard time believeing that you didn't flub a few hundred of them in the process. Eight out of ten decisions being correct is very good in the normal run. Ten for ten is what we all shoot for, but 300-400 million without an owie? That's a stretch, isn't it?

S.O.B.

-- sweetolebob (buffgun@hotmail.com), January 08, 2000.

Watchedd the movie the other day again "Independence day"and two points came up one when the president was told of the area 51 and asked how could he not know about it. Term used plausable deniability

second whe the president asked where did the money come from to build such a place Statement you don't really think they pay (some big doller amount like 25,000) for a screwdriver throw these in the pot and stir the soup

-- davebullis (davebullis@aol.com), January 08, 2000.

HHHhhhmmm. Pondering the reasoning of the government is like counting atoms. There is a point to be made as to why not make this an opportunity. If a function is not critical let's not upgrade the function so that the not needed part is performed faster and with compliant systems. The rules of the government is the more people you have the more important you are. There is the drive to grow your organization. Now you would have the same people who told us these systems and the people who support or use them or not "mission critical" would scream that they are essential to the country.

Al Gore's famous re-engineering the government basically cut defense and defense support and counted that as trimming government. Problem is that defense should be one of the feds core competency, rural electrification and fed subsidies to western power for Copper smelters, I am not so sure.

I say cut them and let the people decide if maybe that was really needed.

-- Squid (ItsDark@down.here), January 09, 2000.